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Does an impaired sense of smell make it harder to think about things like garlic?

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ishrat Khan¹, Nathan Lautz^1,2, Charles Davis³, Gitte Joergensen^1,2, Eiling Yee^1,2; ¹University of Connecticut, ²The Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, ³Duke University

According to sensorimotor-based (also called "embodied" or "grounded") theories of semantic memory, accessing conceptual knowledge about things involves reactivating—or “simulating”—the sensory and motor experiences that we have had with them. For instance, thinking about things for which olfactory experience is dominant (e.g., garlic or lavender) would involve simulating their smell. However, evidence for olfactory simulation when thinking about "smelly” things is sparse and mixed. We tested smell-impaired (“anosmic”) and control participants (N=140 in each group) on three tasks (1) Picture-word verification and (2) Semantic property judgement and (3) Free recall. We predicted that anosmic participants should have more difficulty with smell/taste-experienced items compared to control participants, but perform similarly on “non-smelly” items primarily experienced via other modalities (e.g., zipper, water). In preliminary analyses of picture-word verification task data, anosmic and control participants performed similarly across smelly and non-smelly items. This pattern suggests that for a task like picture-word verification, which does not require retrieving olfactory information, the ability to simulate how something smells does not necessarily improve performance. Additional analyses will explore whether performance on this task is affected by factors like response speed, anosmia duration, or anosmia extent. We will also analyze the other tasks to explore whether, when the task requires retrieving olfactory information (e.g., judging whether sugar is musty), anosmic participants will have difficulty relative to controls. If they do, this would suggest that the extent to which we simulate olfactory information depends on the demands of the task.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Semantic